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MySpace Down Due To Power Surge
BenelliShooter writes "MySpace.Com - Undergoing Maintenance
"hey everyone! there's been a power outage in our data center. we're in the process of fixing it right now, so sit tight. -Tom"
That about says it... I suppose we'll see if they had proper back-ups. " Hah. The site says it was supposed to be back up as of ... 7:40 PST PM. Which was something like close to nine hours ago.
I do refrigeration for a large food wharehouse. When our power went out, we trucked in a 3000KVA generator and bolted the cables into our switchgear. When your business depends on power, you know how to make calls and get it QUICKLY. It cost us 120 gallons of diesel per hour, but we would have had a catastrophic loss without it.
I can understand having power feed the building from two points and even two seperate dmarks for network connectivity. This would protect you from a failure in one part of your building and maybe even from an overzealous backhoe operator or goundskeeper on your property.
The problem that I could see would be the overzealous backhoe operator down the street where all your power/network stuff ends up going allong the same roadside. Worked somwhere with the dual demark think setup.
I worked in a place that had two buldings connected with a walkway so we ran two of our four T1 lines from one ISP and two from another ISP through the other building but all the lines were in the same ditch half a mile down the road.
No matter where you go, there you are.
Probably not: "Hacked MySpace Server Infects a Million Computers with Malware"
The message I got when I visited there (and this is a coincidence, since I don't use my MySpace account except when a friend on another site specifically needs me to, in this case to check out an unrelated technical problem): "hey everyone! there's been a power outage in our data center. we're in the process of fixing it right now, so sit tight. hopefully we'll be back online within the hour. its 6:40pm PST now. wanna place a bet? -Tom"
When I reloaded half an hour later, "Tom" had removed the "its 6:40pm PST now. wanna place a bet?" part. I guess they knew they were having problems that'd take a while.
this guy needs a rating "funny because it's true" Working at a community college, it is ridiculous to walk through the computer labs and see how many students are surfing on myspace alone ... and this isn't a quick 3 minute look and go some where else surfing attitude either. My dept has a student worker that is on myspace almost all day (not much of a worker lol). Anyway, with all the music, large pictures, music videos, and now personal videos being posted and looked at I am very much glad for our network today that it has some breathing room. (btw, I do have the day off :-p)
No, they are complete morons because there is *always* one piece or another of myspace.com that is down. Maybe today it's the bulletins, tomorrow the pictures and comments on your profile. And of course there's always the random "Login had been disabled temporarily due to database problems."
Of course, I don't expect much from a site running off of IIS on Windows.
Sounds like you guys need better maintenance on your hvac/generators. Are they ammonia or freon? Both are quite simple to service and are very redundant. I work with a 30,000 pound anhydrous ammonia system and various freon units and can't imagine how a building's air conditioner would "fail" for more than a few hours. Diesel generators should be tested weekly. The diesel engines on your fire system (you do have one in your building, right?) should also be tested weekly. Switchgear should be inspected/tested yearly. Does your maintenance office have weekly logs showing this was done? We do. Our insurance REQUIRES it. When our smaller backup generator wasn't enough for everything to run for a week, we brought in a bigger one.
If you can't afford to do business in LA, move! Best investment I made!
You can have all the backup systems you want (Multiple power feeds, UPSs, generators, etc) and still have a power failure in you datacenter. I was a *nix systems admin at a telecom company when we started having power outages on a daily basis. Turns out all of the backup systems worked fine but the circuit breakers that had been installed were the wrong amperage rating. The power flux when the generator or UPS kicked in was enough to trip the breakers. Took our site engineers almost a month to figure that one out.
If "disco" means "I learn" in Latin, does "discothèque" mean "I learn technology"?
It always kills me when things like this happen because the backup systems aren't tested on a regular basis. ANY generator -- from the massive ones that can power datacenters to those little camping jobbies with two AC outlets on them -- should be run regularly under some form of load to ensure that when they're needed they still function.
Many generators, in fact, have an automatic "exercise" function that will kick them on at least once a month, run for about 15-30 minutes, and shut off. Any failure to start will turn on a failure light. My home natural gas-fed generator is like this. Our large generators at our datacenters do this. Hell, even the deep-cycle batteries that "carry over" until the generators are fully running are tested on a regular basis. Someone just has to be responsible enough to monitor the test runs for any failures.
It's easy to take all these good "survivable" resources and use them incorrectly in a datacenter environment. I _have_ seen instances where some bullheaded fire safety engineers will take a datacenter buildout and do very strange things with fire sensors and EPO (Emergency Power Off). It's typical that a fire suppression system will fire alarms when two or more sensors detect smoke. Many data centers will then trigger a Halon or FM200 dump to snuff out ignition sources after a fixed amount of time and a lot of head-splitting klaxon warnings. But I've seen some engineers rig the suppression system so the EPO is tripped BEFORE the dry suppression dumps (FM200 and Halon is incredibly expensive), effectively darkening the whole datacenter. EPO also locks out the generator and battery UPS systems, isolating them to their own busses.
Sounds sane? Consider this. Say you have an HVAC system that's spitting out a little smoke from a worn belt. When the EPO trips, the belt stops moving, the smoke disappears, and now your poor security guards have to use flashlights to try to find a now non-existant ignition source. They don't find it, so you have no choice but to turn the power back on. And then the belt starts smoking again, and...
*click*
So often it's not the fact the datacenter has this stuff -- most do -- it's the fact that the stuff isn't really connected properly to the datacenter, isn't designed properly, or isn't managed well by datacenter staff.
Most "real" (read: expensive) routers and switches have an AC input, and a DC input. The latter can be used together with the AC input to provide redundant power.
For servers, come on. Everything non-budget class has two power supplies (or, at least the space for a second one for you to buy). You can even get 1U servers with two power supplies.
We live in an age where, due to widely-held populist views, and political correctness, it is a "sin" to act in a manner that is supposedly "elitist." Now my question is, what precisely is wrong with believing that people have different potentials, and contribute different amounts to society? Most of the great inventions in history were not created by common folk - they were created by people who were excellent in some way. Very intelligent, very wealthy, or maybe just very, very persistant. These uncommon qualities lead to uncommon acheivement, and most of us owe our lives to them (without modern technology, most of us wouldn't have lived to see 20, or maybe even 2).
/.ers is because we once believed that the "democratization" of this medium would lead to a renessaince, would be a life-changing event and would open the floodgates on good content. The problem is not that most people should not be allowed to post on the internet (that is ridiculous), but that most people really do not have anything to say that is valuable to anyone other than their friends. Because their audience is so narrow, the "value added" for the internet as a whole is very small compared to amount of noise this generates. Add to this the amount of bloggers who believe their insights are unique and wonderful (and yet are absolutely not) and the signal to noise ratio on the internet goes way down. I think many people on slashdot feel let down by this, it has made them more cynical about the masses.
/.ers are going too far in saying something like this shouldn't exist, but really, what is so very wrong about being "elitist."
I think the reason for all this elitism towards places like myspace, livejournal, etc from
Not everyone has some brilliant insight to share with others - I know I sure don't, which is why I don't run a blog. I think myspace is great if you're a kid, and people should respect this, but I'd love to be able to tell google to ignore things like myspace/livejournal etc when conducting searches (by default rather than something I must do manually).
So perhaps the "elitist"
I help out at a local bar and am closely connected to alot of the local bands... We USE myspace to aid in our booking, keeping track of shows, advertising for the bars and local bands as well as touring bands that will be playing in the area... MySpace has done wonders for this... before myspace, we had to try to track bands down by more word of mouth, talk about a headache... I don't care how myspace looks, I don't care how the code is written... does it work? yep.. thats all that matters to me...
Myspace is a fantastic tool for the professional artist. I am a musician and it is now the prefered method of booking gigs and making contacts within the industry. It is allowing many artists to flourish and grow in ways which were not as viral or rapid as before. That is the renaissance you speak of. It is alive, it is well, and it is good.
On a side note, now that Myspace has become a huge force in the music scene, and many people are relying upon it to help them meet ends, there needs to be greater responsibility in ensuring that it stays live, 24/7. Whether that requires legislation, I'm not sure. The same night it went down, a friend of mine who runs a club, couldn't get her guest list requests because she gets them from Myspace. She possibly lost a significant amount of money from the bar by not being able to check her myspace messages.
Shouldn't You expect more from your DJ?